From Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second
International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and
Film, ed. William Coyle (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1986), pp. 45-53

Literary fantasy is a rich area for psychoanalytic investigation
since it is a mode dealing with an expression, a manifestation,
of unconscious desires and fears. Since psychoanalysis deals
with the material reality of ideas in society, examining how
individual human beings come to inherit and inhabit the laws
which determine cultural life on an unconscious level, it can be
used in the interpretation of literature -- and its perpetuation
of those cultural norms -- in ways analogous to those used by
Freud in interpreting dreams and neuroses. Many fantasies
contain a desire to break with social conventions and betray an
impulse toward transgression of cultural law, but there is
almost invariably an eventual neutralizing of that impulse,
resulting in its ultimate defeat or deflection into "safe"
forms. In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, I argued
that the most challenging texts are those which defer this safe
resolution until the last possible moment or try to refuse it
altogether.2
Unlike the utopian fantasies of fairy tale, religious myth, or
romance, the modern fantastic refuses supernatural, magical
explanations of strangeness and, in place of a "transcendental"
reality, presents or re-presents a weird, refracted world,
transformed through the mind of the perceiver and his or her
unconscious projections into the world.

By imaginatively protesting against and even fantasizing the
destruction of social codes, only to renew and confirm their
validity, literary fantasies can dramatically articulate social
tensions within themselves. This is particularly the case in
fantasies of dualism, where the narrative center, often the
protagonist himself, is divided into two sides, one subverting
and one upholding the dominant social order. The main focus here
will be on a few selected tales of the double {44} and shadow, but
the argument can be extended to a wide range of texts. For
stories of the double are graphic depictions of the alienation
which is involved in becoming "human" at all: they protest
against and then reenact that drama of insertion into human
culture which is the time when, with the acquisition of
identity, our many protean selves, our undifferentiated
elements, are "unified" and stabilized as "one" character -- the
ego, the I, the self, indivisible and integral, upon which
society depends.

Recent studies of the double in literature have acknowledged its
shift in the Romantic period from a supernatural motif into an
increasingly self-conscious psychological function. From its
appearance in Jean-Paul's Hesperus (1795) onward, the
double has been recognized as originating from within the human
subject.3
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg's The Private
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) are
particularly interesting in that they are remarkable
transitional works. They represent an explicit shift from a
presentation of a demonic "other" as supernaturally evil, the
devil in a conventional iconography, toward something much more
disturbing because equivocal, ambiguous in its nature and
origins. Hogg's Confessions preserves a brilliant and
puzzling ambiguity about the genesis of the demonic presence --
is it natural or supernatural? -- and the text eludes any
definitive interpretation by suggesting it is both and neither.
Hogg's fantasy sees the devil move from one identity to another.
It "is" the sinner himself, and his brother George, and also
other characters, as well as a traditional prince of darkness.
Yet conventional explanations of a "supernatural" devil figure
are betrayed, within the text itself, as redundant. The reader
is left stranded, unable to know who or what the shadow is,
forced to recognize it as a reflection of every self, a shifting
and distorting mirror image of anyone, alienated or
metamorphosed into a distant, unfamiliar "other." The double
then comes to be seen as an aspect of the psyche, externalized
in the shape of another in the world.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein operates similarly but is
more explicit about the link between the self and its monstrous
projections into the shape of another outside itself. Despite
the apparently supernatural powers of the monster, it is
literally a product of scientist Frankenstein's own ideas and
actions, and it is to be located entirely within a human scheme
of things. The monster functions as a parodic mirror image of
Frankenstein: "My form," it mocks him, "is a filthy type of
yours, made horrid even from the very resemblance." Frankenstein
feels it to be demonic and laments his tragic destiny: "I was
cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my external
hell,"4 but
he confesses that the monster is really self-generated, "the
being whom I had cast among mankind
. . . [was] my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave,
and forced to destroy all that was dear to me."5 It is no
accident that the monster is anonymous or that in the popular
imagination it has come to be confused with Frankenstein himself
and frequently given his name, for it is his grotesque
reflection, his unnamed, unformed selves. Naming the double is
impossible for both Frankenstein and Hogg's sinner since {45} it
is themselves in alienated form, an image of themselves before
they acquired names. At the heart of both works, as indeed of
all fantasies, is the problem of identity, a problem given
particular prominence in tales of the double. Hogg's convoluted
narrative dramatizes uncertainty as to the coherence of the "I"
and expresses the sinner's sense of loss of any viable identity:
"I seemed hardly to be an accountable creature . . . I
was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second
self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body
was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no
control."6
Mary Shelley's creature is similarly lost, crying out, "I had
never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any
intercourse with me. What was I? I have no relation or friend on
earth."7
Their preoccupations, indeed obsessions, with identity point to
the Oedipal drama which is at their centers, though displaced.
Their recurrent question is: Who am I? Where do I come from? How
can I feel whole?

Despite the possibility of simplistic readings of stories of the
double as simply allegories of the "good" and "evil" sides of
mankind -- particularly in less complex fantasies such as Robert
Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886) -- fantasies of dualism have more to do with a
quest for wholeness and integration than with mere moral
division. They are driven by a desire to reverse the process of
alienation which occurs in the earliest stages of human
development, and their quest is focused upon an ideal beyond or
before the formation of the ego.

This desire is best understood in relation to Freud's theories of human growth,
especially as elaborated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan.8 For
the incredible proliferation of doubles in Romantic and
post-Romantic literature points to an identical unconscious
structuration lying behind them. As Marianne Wain writes, "It is
astonishing, when one goes through Romantic writing generally
. . . to see how this preoccupation with the lost
center of personality is a veritable obsession."9 Following from
Jean-Paul's novels, William
Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Charles Brockden Brown's
Wieland (1798), Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea
(1808), Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1814),
Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816), E. T. A. Hoffman's
Doppleganger and Elixirs of the Devil (1816), C.
R. Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Edgar Allan
Poe's William Wilson (1839), Feodor Dostoevski's The
Double (1846), Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
(1859), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891),
Henry James's The Jolly Corner (1908), and Joseph
Conrad's The Secret Sharer (1912) all share a similar
psychic structure which cannot be explained away as merely
literary influence or coincidence. They fantasize a fragmented
or dualistic existence as part of a process of returning to a
pre-Oedipal stage of being as reference to Freud and Lacan will
clarify.

The Oedipal complex -- that knot of both hostile and loving
wishes which the child has toward its parents and which, in its
positive form, appears as a sexual desire for the parent of the
opposite sex -- occurs between the ages of three and five and is
crucial in structuring the individual personality and its
desires. However, preceding this period are equally important
and determining stages. Freud {46} identified three distinct but
overlapping states in the child -- and in culture as a whole.
The first is a stage of primary narcissism or self-love. In a
paradigm of "normal" development, this has to give way to an
attachment to objects outside the self, a relinquishing of
self-love, which eventually leads to the third stage, an
acceptance of the laws of the world, its "reality principle" and
necessities of self-repression for the sake of cultural
continuity. In this tripartite scheme, the most crucial sequence
is between the first and second stages, in the transition from
primary narcissism (love for self) to attachment to love objects
(love for other). For what the child has to relinquish here is a
state of undifferentiation, in which it has not yet learned to
make any difference between self and other, Lacan has termed
this "le stade du miroir," the mirror stage, when the
self is recognized as separate, as an object constituted by the
look, the look of others. It is in the mirror phase that there
is a progression from what Lacan terms an "asubjectivity of
total presence" to the establishment of a coherent and unified
subjectivity -- the human subject, the ego, the I. This precedes
the Oedipal stage and its establishment of gender
difference.

With the mirror stage, there are now two I's: one to perceive,
one to be perceived. The process of becoming an ego, becoming a
human subject, involves acquiring duality: alienation is at the
heart of identification. Prior to this, there is no sense of a
whole, distinct, separate body, but fluidity, instability,
incoherence, presence. Part of the notion of the pre-Oedipal is
this idea of the non-whole, fragmented body, termed by Lacan
"le corps morcelé," the body in pieces. It is
worth extending a description of this state because of its
relation to Frankenstein:

At this stage the infant has no organisation of data into those
associated with its own body and those associated with its
exteriority. It has no sense of its physical separateness or of
its physical unity. This is the moment referred to retroactively
after the "mirror phase," by the phantasy of the "body in
fragments." The mirror phase is the moment when the infant
realises the distinction between its own body and the outside:
the "other." The infant sees its reflection in a mirror and
identifies with it. . . . The image with which the
infant identifies, which Lacan says can be described as the
"Ideal-I," is positioned in the world exterior to the
infant. . . . The ego results from the entry of the I
into an identification with an object in the other (the
non-infant).10

What seems to happen in fantasies of dualism is a reversal of
the Oedipal drama and a reversal of the mirror stage -- a
repudiation of the dominance both of the Father and of the Ideal
ego, the I, formed with the subject. It is an unlearning of the
distinction between body and what lies outside it, a
non-identification with the reflection in the mirror, and its
ego outline, a desire for that state preceding the fall
into alienation. It is an attempt to loosen, or to lose, the ego
and its dominance by uncovering something less fixed, less
formed, less nameable, and, inevitably, less social. Lacan has
termed this longing for an original state of undifferentiation
as the central unconscious longing in every human being: it is
"an eternal and irreducible human desire . . . an
eternal desire for the {47} non-relationship of zero, where
identity is meaningless."11 It is this desire which is
fulfilled in the unity of mysticism and of oneness with God, but
which in Western secular culture -- where all our Romantic and
post-Romantic fantasies are placed -- takes more frustrated and
agonized forms.

The motif of the double in literary fantasy can be regarded as a
variation on a theme of alienated identity, also evident in
related motifs such as the reflection, the shadow, the ghost,
the monster, the magic portrait, the stranger. Behind these
variants lies the idea of the mirror and its production of
reflected selves, for the mirror establishes a different space
in which the "real" or "normal" is inverted or broken. Behind
the mirror is a space both familiar and unfamiliar: it sets up
distance and difference. Leo Bersani writes that the mirror is
"a spatial representation of an intuition that our being can
never be enclosed within any present formulation -- any
formulation here and now of our being."12 It is in precisely this
metaphorical capacity that the mirror entered the language of
psychoanalysis, and a reversal of the mirror stage can be seen
as a metaphor for the production, or recovery, of other multiple
selves.

Lacan stresses that the establishment of identity, the
construction of the ego, inevitably involves a sense of loss and
anxiety, in which there is an uneasy memory trace of previous
union now apprehended as unattainable. A relation between the
two I's, self and ideal ego, develops into one of hostility and
resentment, with the ideal I, like the eye, constantly on the
watch, judging, controlling, condemning, preventing any attempts
of the subject to fall away from a strict coincidence with its
limited, monistic, integrated social identity. Like Freud's
notion of superego, this I acts as censor and judge and is the
source of an internal awareness of guilt, apprehension, even
paranoia. The double, a fantasy of evading this monistic I/eye,
has a difficult relation to the unitary subject, haunting
him/her with a reminder of all that has been excluded and
amputated in the process of social formation. It is this which
gives the double its subversive function, for as Bakhtin writes
in his discussion of Dostoevski's version of dualism, through
the double, "the possibilities of another man and another life
are revealed. . . . The dialogical attitude of man to
himself . . . contributes to the destruction of his
integrity and finalizedness."13

The double functions as a figure onto which are externalized
inadmissible and tabooed desires. They are products of
projection, by which is meant "the operation whereby qualities,
feelings, wishes or even 'objects,' which the subject refuses to
recognize or rejects in himself are expelled from the self and
located in another person or thing. Projection so understood is
a defence of very primitive origin (and is at work especially in
cases of paranoia)."14 It involves a defiance of the rule
of the Father, an attempt to elude the threat of castration
which hangs over the child, and to recover a state of union with
the mother and of primary narcissism. Freud's collaborator, Otto
Rank, in the first psychoanalytic study of the double, wrote
that the double represents man's relationship with himself and
that it "personifies narcissistic self love."15 Freud,
influenced by Rank's work to investigate narcissism more deeply,
realized that the double was, in its original {48} formation,
"an insurance against the destruction of the ego," "an energetic
denial of the power of death," the modern inheritor of the idea
of the immortal soul as the double of the physical body. For the
production of a reflection or of multiple gives defends against
a fear of not-being, by creating a being immune to space, time,
change, or mortality. The double, according to Freud, is a
preservation against extinction, a product of the fear of
castration and of a desire for immortality, and he finds the
source of such ideas in "the primary narcissism which dominates
the mind of the child and of primitive man."16

The least interesting fantasies of the double use it merely as
an allegorical means of dramatizing moral assumptions.
Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example, has
Jekyll as the Ideal I, censoring and judging those aspects of
himself which are socially unacceptable and projected onto Hyde.
Their names signify their functions: Jekyll means I kill --
pointing to the murderous side concealed within his respectable
role and projected onto Hyde, all that is hidden. Stevenson's
ideological position prevented him from fully exploring the
complexities of such a relationship -- though there are moments
when his fantasy does open onto pre-Oedipal possibilities -- and
his text is reduced to a rather simple fable. Much more complex
dramatizations of subjectivity are found in Hogg's Confessions and in
William Godwin's much
neglected and brilliant story of paranoia and persecution,
Caleb Williams. It was this tale of guilt which was a
major source of inspiration to Godwin's daughter, Mary Shelley,
in her writing of Frankenstein, and it is her particular
version of monstrous doubling which I shall examine in more
detail, since it has become such a potent and popular modern
myth, lying behind many literary and film texts.

As was suggested above, Oedipal questions are at the heart of
Frankenstein: the monster's tormented quest for identity
is but a vast echo of the searchings of Walton -- the first
narrator -- and Frankenstein, the second. "Who was I? What was
I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions
continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them."17 Frankenstein
creates the monster to fill a gap -- the absence caused by the
death of his mother -- and it is the quest for a lost mother
which informs the whole text. By becoming an unnatural mother,
"giving birth" to another, who is a reflection of himself,
Frankenstein is able to be the mother he lacks, to supply
to himself his own need for a mother. Behind his link with the
monster -- the same sex as he -- and their love/hate
relationship is a need close to the one Freud described in his
essay on homosexual love as "proceeding from a narcissistic base
. . . homosexuals look for a man whom they may love as
their mother loved them."18 Significantly, the monster is made
up of bits and pieces of corpses, dead bodies of others,
reconstructed from the region of death where the mother now
lies. Frankenstein's creation is a displaced desire to be at one
with the mother again and through her to reattain that primary
narcissism of undifferentiated existence. A drive for reunion
with the mother dominates each section of Frankenstein:
there are four family units and each one is characterized by the
lack of a mother; and the same drive lies behind the
central fantasy itself, the production of a {49} monstrous,
transgressive but mirror-imaged "other," a pre-Oedipal,
unnameable shade.

Soon after its genesis, the monster murders Frankenstein's
intimates: the brother who displaced him in his mother's
affections, the innocent girl who had taken over his mother's
caring role after her death, then his bride and half-sister,
Elizabeth. Elizabeth is murdered on their wedding night, at
precisely that moment when the incest taboo is about to be
transgressed, for Elizabeth is a replacement for the mother in
Frankenstein's desires and in the family constellation. Thus the
monster acts to save his maker from castration -- the punishment
for breaking the taboo -- and is, on yet another level, a
defense against the fear of castration.

Behind a desire for the mother, however, is a desire for that
"non-relationship of zero, where identity is meaningless," the
stage of primary narcissism, which the production of the double
is an attempt to regain. Frankenstein's monster is a fantastic
example of the idea of "le corps morcelé," the
body-in-pieces, for it is actually made up of dismembered,
disjointed bodies, not one but many. It is the fragmented body
which precedes the unification and identification of wholeness
in the mirror stage, a literal reanimation of our dead and
buried selves, those pieces of our otherness from which we have
been severed in the act of becoming ego-bound. Initially, this
body is not evil -- it is outside moral issues, beyond good and
evil -- but it has evil thrust upon it and gradually comes to
assume a more conventional role as an evil monster.
Frankenstein is one of the most radical and tense modern
fantasies -- and it is no accident that it was produced by a
woman writer, on the periphery of Romanticism and unconsciously
questioning its ideals of wholeness and ego-integrity --
precisely because of its refusal to accept moral
categorization of the monster. The monster is like a child, at
first without form or language, and it is a fantasy version of
Frankenstein's pre-Oedipal existence.

Part of the work's radical position lies in its refusal of
closure. Unlike other tales of the double, where the shadow side
is murdered, or reassimilated, or seen as illusory,
Frankenstein insists on the creature's constant
presence. There is no reconciliation of the two sides of the
self, and their mutual haunting and obsession with each other in
a complex symbiotic relationship never really ends. After
Frankenstein's death, the monster wanders disconsolately into
the ice and snow, toward an unknown vanishing point. The text
itself, which had opened with a Chinese-box structure of letters
within letters, is not resealed: the monster's shapeless form is
the last image to be witnessed. What remains, through this
refusal of closure of the narrative, is a radical
open-endedness of being, of both text and reader, an
opening-up made possible through the introduction of a fantasy
or pre-Oedipal life. The bond between Frankenstein and monster
is unresolvable precisely because of its internal origin,
and in life there can be no overcoming of their condition of
alienation as the two I's. As Irving Massey writes, "The monster
is something completely internal. . . . The monster
may be simply solipsism itself, or an unhappy form of narcissism
. . . the monster is an aspect with which Frankenstein
cannot or will not come to terms. . . . And so they
must {50} resume their endless dialectic of conflict, until, in
death, they spiral into one again."19

If the ending of Frankenstein is compared with the ending
of a more moralistic and allegorical fantasy of doubling and
projection, its radical position is made even more clear. George
MacDonald, for example, uses shadows and reflections in his
Victorian fantasies, and even in their "high" religious fantasy
a similar unconscious structuration can be detected. The
Golden Key (1867), At the Back of the North Wind
(1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), The
Princess and Curdie (1883), Phantasies (1858), and
Lilith (1895) can all be read as fantasies of rejection
of the Oedipal moment and as attempts to return to a pre-Oedipal
stage. At the Back of the North Wind, a popular
children's story, fantasizes a movement into a changeless,
timeless zone -- really a landscape of nonbeing -- through the
entrance into a woman's womb. MacDonald's proliferating shadows
and doubles in his more "adult" fantasies, Phantastes and
Lilith, are attempts to ward off castration and to evade
the law of the Father, but there is little real struggle or
conflict with or through them.

Lilith, for example, has its narcissistic hero Vane --
his name signifying his vanity -- moving from an anxious inquiry
as to his origins and real identity ("What is behind my
think? Am I there at all? Who, what am I? I could
no more answer the question. . . . I gave myself up as
knowing anything of myself or the universe") to a submission to
the Father's expulsion of him from the mother's place.20 After
rediscovering and lying next to his mother in a strangely dead
landscape -- indeed an almost farcical scene of fantasized
incest -- where he is "blessed as never was man on the eve of
his wedding" (MacDonald, Lilith, p. 247), Vane is ejected
by a male figure, Adam, the first man/father, and he apologizes:
"I ought not to have lain down without your leave" (p. 248).
Vane reenters the living world a wiser and better man, for he
has accepted the symbolic castration which this scene
represents. The "great shadow," which has been hovering
throughout the story, is at last dispelled -- because Vane has
incorporated it into himself.21

The shadow/double figure at the end of Lilith is written out of
the text, not because a pre-Oedipal unity has finally been
attained, but because the desire for pre-Oedipal
undifferentiation has been repressed. Instead it is displaced
onto a transcendental ideal of unity, a sublimated heavenly
state in which dualism is unknown. This is a displacement of
desire which is common to all transcendental fantasies -- a
removal of contradiction from a human to a religious or
supernatural scheme of things. MacDonald's words betray the
unconscious wish-fulfillment behind this ideal, when his
narcissistic Vane admits to his maturity in these terms: "I have
never again sought the mirror" for "that life which, as a mother
her child, carries this life in its bosom" (p. 274). A desire
for pre-Oedipal fluidity and non-identification has been
displaced here onto a more socially acceptable ideal of union
with a divine mother/father.

The difference between works like Frankenstein and
Lilith may have to do with the different genders of their
authors, since these will have produced dif- {51} ferent
formations of the social being through the Oedipal drama.
However, there are further implications in their treatments of
the double motif. Frankenstein suggests that there can be
no satisfactory resolution of the conflict between the Ideal ego
and the fragmented, protean selves outside its formation. It is
an open-ended work, leaving in tension various parts of the
psyche, creating a sense of contradiction and dissatisfaction
with social constructs -- of identity, language, morality, law,
knowledge, reason, time, and space. It subverts the notion of a
unified character or ego and implies that there are unknown
and unexpected forms of subjectivity, or pre-subjectivity, which
are repressed and concealed in or through the normal and
normalizing process of identification. Produced from the
edge of the Romantic movement by a female writer, it fantasizes
the continued existence of pre-Oedipal states, of pre-moral and
pre-male undifferentiation. It takes a negative, almost tragic
form because of Mary Shelley's positioning as she wrote from
within that male culture and its ideals, but it can be
interpreted as an attempt to break or dissolve the ego by
un-doing the process of its formation.

MacDonald, through his fantasy of submission and of eventual
sublimation of a desire for the pre-Oedipal state, reconstructs
the ego. He ends by rewriting, reinscribing, patriarchal values
onto the human body, producing a text which, as might be
expected from a male theologian at the core of Victorian
conservatism, is deeply reactionary in its equation of a
preordained cosmic and social harmony. By contrast, Mary
Shelley's writing takes much more cognizance of the real
consequences of inhabiting a post-Romantic, secular, patriarchal
culture. Frankenstein provides a tense dramatization of
the problematic nature of identity, its cost, its alienation of
"self" from potential selves, from others, from the world which
is quite unlike the facile wish-fulfillments of magical unity
found in the dream works of MacDonald and those "high" fantasy
writers in his wake.22 Mary Shelley's version of dualism,
which is, in effect, more of a fantasy of pre-Oedipal
multiplicity, opposes itself to the idealism and the universals
of Romantic and transcendental art, ultimately putting into
question the very premises on which our materialistic, rational
culture is based and exposing its promises of fulfillment. As
Julia Kristeva writes: "The call of the unnameable
. . . issuing from those borders where signification
vanishes, hurls us into the void [which] appears henceforth as
the solidary reverse of our universe, saturated with
interpretation, faith, or truth."23

Notes

1. Epigraph of The Student of Prague
(1913), an expressionistic film on the theme of the double.

2. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature
of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981). Other works
discussing the contradictions embedded in Gothic fantasy include Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in
England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972) and
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic
Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman,
1980).

3. See Ralph Tymns, Doubles in Literary
Psychology (Cambridge, England: Bowes & Bowes, 1949);
Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the
Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University
Press, 1969); Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the
Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1970); and C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second
Self (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972).

8. Freud's ideas referred to in this essay can
be found in "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905),
vol. VII of The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey
(London: Macmillan, 1953). The most accessible introduction to
Lacan's work is Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self,
trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1968).

9. Marianne Wain, "The Double in Romantic
Narrative: A Preliminary Study," Germanic Review 36
(1961), 260. See also Louis Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in
Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth
Century (Lund: Gleerup, 1967).

10. Steve Bumiston, "Lacan's Theory of the
Constitution of the Subject in Language," in On Ideology
(London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 212.

11. See Lacan, Écrits: A
Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977),
particularly the chapter "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I," which is reprinted as "The Mirror-Phase" in
New Left Review 51 (1968), 71-77.

21. Robert Lee Woolf, The Golden Key: A
Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1961) provides a biographical version of the
formative years of MacDonald's life, relating a sense of the
absent mother in his work to his early weaning and his mother's
premature death.

22. Stephen Prickett in Victorian
Fantasy (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979) sees
MacDonald's work as part of a tradition of "high" fantasy,
characterized by a strongly Platonic idealism and evident in the
writings of Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Walter
de la Mare, and Edith Nesbit. This tradition also includes C.
S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other contemporary
fabulists.